From No. 1 to No. 213 in local quality of life

EDMONTON - How does your neighbourhood rate as a place to
live? The City of Edmonton has an answer.

EDMONTON - How does your neighbourhood rate as a place to live? The City of Edmonton has an answer.

In a wide-ranging study that looks at everything from the number of single parents to the condition of city streets, the city has amassed a huge pile of data, and a corresponding quality-of-life ranking, on 213 Edmonton neighbourhoods.

At the bottom of the list is Alberta Avenue, a neighbourhood now working hard to drive out prostitutes and drug dealers and attract new residents. Its ranking was zero -- not a suggestion that the area has no quality of life, but that it has the most challenges to overcome.

At the top are some of the city's new suburbs, like Henderson Estates in the southwest. It drew a rating of 93 out of 100 in the study.

Angelo Blais has been happy since moving to Henderson Estates with his young family three years ago, but adds that the suburb's streets are hardly paved with gold.

He also has a 25-minute daily commute to his downtown office, something not factored into the rankings.

The index, created in 2005, uses 20 quality-of-life factors defined by the Population Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta. The lab has been hired by the city to update the data.

The aim of the survey is to provide objective information to help decide which areas should be the city's top priorities for neighbourhood revitalization. Thirty-one communities are now on that list, with Alberta Avenue the first target.

Efforts there are already paying off, even before $35 million in government revitalization money starts arriving next year, says Peter Rausch, executive director of the Alberta Avenue Business Association.

Saturday's Bloomin' Back Alleys event, a series of workshops on composting, window boxes and such things, is just the latest example of revitalization in the neighbourhood.

Rausch says there are now 210 businesses in the 28-block zone of 118th Avenue that he works with, up from 178 two years ago.

After Alberta Avenue, some west-end neighbourhoods along Stony Plain Road are next in line for revitalization dollars.

Not surprisingly, the results rate suburbs higher than older neighbourhoods.

The inner-city Inglewood neighbourhood, for example, has a rating of 17. Inglewood has 400 low-income households and 1,061 food bank users, according to the data.

Terwillegar Towne in the suburbs, with a rating of 86, has no food bank users and just 10 low-income households.

But do the quality-of-life ratings really reflect how people feel about their community? Not always.

Trendy Strathcona, with its low ranking of 22, is one of the 31 communities targeted for revitalization. Compared with city averages, it has more transient residents, property crime, low-income households and food bank users.

It also has some mighty happy residents.

"Every time I hear about traffic tie-ups on the Whitemud and we're on the neighbour's deck having a glass of wine, I remember that, while there's downsides to where we live, there's also a lot of positives," says Joanne Booth, president of the Strathcona Community League.

Strathcona has its challenges -- such as the Whyte Avenue "party zone" -- but it is also a walkable neighbourhood with 100-year-old elm trees lining the streets, she says.

Andrew Harrell, head of the population lab at the U of A, agrees the survey's "objective data" don't tell the whole story.

"Cities tend to look at these objective indicators -- unemployment, hospitalization rates -- but they rarely put that together with what people really think," Harrell says. "And that's where we really want to go next."

He'd like to survey residents to hear what they think of where they live.

He hopes the provincial government

Will pay for that survey, and possibly for similar ones in Calgary and Grande Prairie.

Joan Agnew, a city staffer who helped prepare the index, says it will become a "change index," showing neighbourhoods rising or falling on the quality-of-life scale.

Kathy Barnhart, the city's manager of social and recreation services, hopes the index will be used in positive ways.

"We don't want people to think of their neighbourhood as a bad place, and to have it have a negative impact on their real estate or whatever else," Barnhart says. "The whole idea is to engage citizens in revitalization, and to have them see the positive."

sruttan@thejournal.canwest.com

TOP EIGHT

Some of the city's higher-ranked neighbourhoods, rated on a 100-point scale:

- Henderson Estates: 93.04

- Terwillegar Towne: 86.58

- Quesnell Heights: 83.06

- Windsor Park: 76.28

- Grandview: 75.45

- Laurier Heights: 74.9

- Belgravia: 74.25

- Glenora: 62.38

1. Alberta Avenue: 0

2. Central McDougall: 1.99

3. Eastwood: 7.34

4. Oliver: 10.88

5. Calder: 18.15

6. Canora: 18.27

7. Inglewood: 18.79

8. Balwin: 19.55

9. Downtown: 19.66

10. Belvedere: 20.18

11. Elmwood Park: 21.57

12. Callingwood South: 21.79

13. Strathcona: 22.18

14. Parkdale: 22.55

15. Empire Park: 23.20

16. Glenwood: 23.24

17. Brittannia/ Youngstown: 23.78

18. Allendale: 24.47

19. Killarney: 25.89

20. King Edward Park: 26.31

21. Boyle-McCauley: 27.09*

22. Spruce Avenue: 27.82

23. Montrose: 27.61

24. West Jasper Place: 28.50

25. Abbotsfield: 29.27

26. Evansdale: 30.15

27. Westmount: 30.42

28. Newton: 30.98

29. Queen Mary Park: 31.20

30. Kilkenny: 31.24

31. Rundle Heights: 32.44

- Rating is average of the two communities. Boyle's rating was 32.62, McCauley's 21.56

Measures used in the rankings

- Number of child welfare cases

- Number of single-parent families

- Number of people who have moved in past year

- Percentage of hospital ER visits

- Rate of hospitalization

- Number of property crimes

- Number of violent crimes

- Number of youth crimes

- Percentage of adults with less than Grade 9

- School transiency rates

- Number of dwellings needing major repairs

- Percentage of dwellings that are rented

- Number of households paying more than 30 per cent of their income on shelter

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